K-2

Dinnertime is a place stories are told at my house. One of my favorite storytellers is my husband Matt. When he tells a story, you feel like you are there. Stories are memorable, they can take us to another world, and for mathematics, stories bring context to the abstract. Our world is full of exciting… Continue Reading

As I watched my daughter Bethany do her homework last night I had an Aha Moment. She complains almost every day that she has addition and subtraction homework. Apparently, she does not have her mother’s love of math. (I’m working on that.) Her paper had simple numeric addition and subtraction, and she decided that she… Continue Reading

This blog post will be the final in a three-part series on teaching addition and subtraction. Part One talks about the Change Plus/Change Minus, and Part Two talks about Composing/Decomposing. Our last situation is Comparison. After reading Mathematics Learning in Early Childhood, I realized how foundational comparing relations (talking about two sets being more than,… Continue Reading

I remember my first experience in a Mathematics Methods Course of a Part/Part Whole Mat. I really liked how the mat could be used for both addition and subtraction. This was the beginning of my pedagogical understanding of composing and decomposing as an addition and subtraction situation. I have already written a series of posts… Continue Reading

After writing my last blog post, What’s the Difference?, I thought it would be helpful if I blogged about all the different addition and subtraction situations. This post will talk about one of three addition and subtraction situations: the Change Plus/Change Minus situation. What I find fascinating is how researchers have found that Pre-K children… Continue Reading

I was helping my daughter, who is in kindergarten, with her homework. She claimed the homework was too hard. She was working on subtraction in her class and the instructions for her homework were: FIND THE DIFFERENCE. I thought to myself, does she even understand subtraction as a comparison situation? Was that the thinking her… Continue Reading

In my last post, I talked about the connection between decomposing numbers and place value. Understanding how numbers can be decomposed into parts lays the foundation for breaking apart numbers into specific groups. These specific groups could be anything, but for our numeration system they will be ten. You may want to check out the… Continue Reading

Field Testing Experience During my recent field-testing in Kindergarten, students worked with different pictures of teddy bear counters and with five frames. I would give the students a picture and they would build the picture in their five frame, then fill in their sentence frames and read them. They did a great job! They were… Continue Reading

Daily journaling is one of the constants in my life. Over many years, I don’t believe there has been a single day when I did not make at least half a dozen entries in my journal. Each entry is dated, so on any given day I will write the date at least half a dozen… Continue Reading

As I talked about in my earlier posts, I am really interested in learning about the Japanese methods of teaching math concepts. As I was exploring a 1st grade Japanese textbook that Phil Daro recommended, I noticed something I wanted to field test. The textbook had the students placing counters on top of the pictures… Continue Reading